Living Modern: Hélio Oiticica at the Art Institute of Chicago
Co-organised by the Whitney Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Curated by Lynn Zelevansky, Elisabeth Sussman, Sondra Gilman, James Rondeau, Eloise W. Martin, Donna De Salvo, and Anna Katherine Brodbeck
Hélio Oiticica. Metaesquema, 1958–59. Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle.
A few weeks back I finally got the push I needed to stomach the weak Canadian dollar and head down to Chicago for the first time – the first full-scale US retrospective of Hélio Oiticica, To Organize Delirium at the Art Institute of Chicago. To get to the museum, you first have to pass through a post-modern paradise of landscape design and public art: a curvaceous pedestrian bridge (Frank Gehry), an immense polished steel bean (Anish Kapoor), an ecstatic exploding bandshell (Gehry), and other eclectic features. After all of that sensationalism the formal restraint of architect Renzo Piano’s thoughtfully restrained addition to the Art Institute of Chicago provides a welcome invitation. Inside, a late modernist story plays out across the work of the Brazilian neo-concrete artist that I was there to see, a visionary who arrived at the story of modernism in the 1950s and pushed European abstraction past its dogmatic hermeticism, radically, into the social space of our lived experiences.
Born in 1937 in Rio de Janeiro, Oiticica was a prolific artist who made sophisticated contributions to the abstraction as a painter and later, as an interdisciplinary artist. He innovated radical new categories and forms for art with non-narrative experimental films, installations, penetrable paintings, and “parangoles” – flexible colour structures made to be worn over the body and which were designed to be performed by samba dancers and everyday citizens. Consistent across most of this work is his exploration of abstraction, especially the formal elements of plane, shape and colour. Oiticica’s formalism echoes the look and disciplined rigour of European concrete artists such as Max Bill and Theo van Doesburg, but like other neo-concrete artists such as Lygia Pape and Lygia Clark, Oiticica eschewed industrial finish and formal austerity, emphasizing greater sensuality, participatory engagement, symbolic and even political messages. Where concrete artists looked to cerebral formalism, Oiticica looked to the Brazilian Carnival.
The exhibition introduces Oiticica’s work predictably, by chronology, but quickly moves the viewer through a greater complexity of experiences by overlapping works made throughout the 1960s and 1970s in London, New York, and upon returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1980. Just before the entrance to the feature exhibition, in a small side gallery we find early examples of the artist’s refined and understated gouache on cardboard geometric abstractions from the late 1950s displayed among works by other Brazilian neo-concrete artists. The exhibition opens in earnest with a suite of expanded paintings – suspended spatial reliefs made from wood and painted in closely related colours. Born from the geometric precision of the 2D gouache works, these folding planes and shifting geometries produce a surprising lightness of colour and introduce new elements to the discipline of painting: time, space and chance.
Hélio Oiticica. NC6 Medium Nucleus 3 (NC6 Núcleo médio 3, 1961–63) at Rua Engenheiro Alfredo Duarte, Rio de Janeiro, n.d. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro.
The central feature of the exhibition is found in the largest gallery with two of the artist’s most important environmental “penetrables.” Eden (1969) and Tropicália (1967) are impressive examples of what would later be called installation art. Both works are sprawling, sand-covered pavilion-type spaces containing small favela-like structures made from painted wood platforms and walls, woven natural fences, primary coloured tarpaulin tent-forms and other tactile fabrics of varying colour and translucency. The results are labyrinthine zones for sensorial interaction, relaxation and refuge. The small pavilions, stone pathways and walls help with navigating the space, but the experience is punctuated by less predictable encounters with arresting sensations: the gritty leaves of too-dry tropical potted plants; the salt-earth smell of accumulated sweat embedded in the natural textiles and wooden walls; the cool sensation of water underfoot in a small square pond followed by the inevitable grit of wet sand caked between toes. Vividly-hued tropical birds squawk brightly from their cage and claustrophobic dank corridors spiral inward to a black-and-white television tuned to a local Chicago broadcast blaring car ads and infomercials. Both works contain space for privacy, relaxation and reflection. It is from here that the exhibition orients the remaining works in the show, around the transitory sensations and creative experiences of each viewer now changed through creative leisure, or what the artist called “creleisure.”
At this point we might imagine that Eden and Tropicália represent the most mature works to date, their radicalism arrived at only by advancing through the evolutionary stages of the gouache drawings and coloured environments, but evolutionary metaphors as curatorial methodology don’t always work. The risk here is that such linear structures can replace engagement with historiography or tokenism (Latin American artistic emancipation from the Euro/American modernist narratives) or, more damagingly, superimpose the myth of the artist genius overtop of the experiences of each unique participant. The curators tread this line carefully and use the larger halls of the museum to great effect, de-emphasizing the artist’s timeline by intermixing works from different media and periods, while using smaller connecting galleries to introduce the visitor to Oiticica’s eloquent writing found in his volumes of notes and textual propositions.
Luiz Fernando Guimarães wearing Oiticica’s P30 Parangolé Cape 23, M’Way Ke, at the West Side Piers, New York, 1972. Private Collection. © César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.
For an artist who’s primary goal was to expand the individual’s capacities for creative play and discovery, the challenge for any curator is to get themselves, the institution and the biography of the artist out of the way of the art while producing a cogent exhibition which contributes meaningful scholarship. To the credit of the team of seven curators, To Organize Delirium seems to measure this challenge, putting the emphasis not on Oiticica as an avant-garde outsider belonging to the past, but on his works, which appear charged with creative potential for contemporary audiences.
Anecdotally, To Organize Delirium is maybe the least instagrammable exhibition I‘ve seen in years – not because it isn’t captivating and beautiful, but because the environments were so engrossing that every gallery-goer I saw on that busy Saturday seemed to have forgotten entirely about documenting their experiences. This vitality of experience spills over from Oiticica’s installations and affects the documentary films, non-narrative cinema environments, and more immersive installations in the remaining galleries. The result is a compelling contradiction: the work is undeniably tied to the past – born from the social and political upheavals of the 1960’s – and yet seems completely effectual to audiences a half a century later.
Hélio Oiticica. PN27 Penetrable, Rijanviera, 1979. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro.
Daniel Hutchinson is an artist living in Hamilton, Ontario. Upcoming exhibitions include the group show Sparrow Night at Museum London and a two-person exhibition at Angell Gallery, Toronto.
